His work on Vagrant Story was phenomenal. Japanese scripts tend to be really boring and samey. Without the work of a good localizer, you’d hear the same twenty anime one-liners interspersed throughout the entire game.
There are exceptionally few puns that can be translated literally. One that comes to mind is from a Lipton Limone advert, where Miranda Kerr says 「おいチイ」, when I first heard it I thought it was just an accent thing, but the second time I realised it’s a pun; Tealicious.
I used to see it all the time when I read unofficial transliterations of manga and the translator tried to make the pun work, they’d include a note explaining the joke. Personally I prefer localisation which keeps the spirit of what was meant but the text/lines flows in a much more natural way to a native English speaker.
It’s a common fan translation technique, and–as far as the criticism sourced in good faith goes–I wonder if it’s the genesis of a lot of the grumbling. Back when fans had to rely on independent, amateur translating to have access to more material.
Maybe some of them would just prefer the “literal with footnotes” approach.
I don't think anyone would've complained if the localization's quality was on-par with AA or Vagrant Story, but it looks to me like that isn't the case.
The complaints are largely, as she says, “sacrificed accuracy for flowery prose.” Japanese games in this setting still often follow in the footsteps of early Dragon Quest and the Final Fantasy games set in Ivalice by not strictly using contemporary English.
I think it’s an interesting conversation when it can be divorced from “removing insensitive language is censorship” crowd.
My problem with the pro localization argument, is I’m enjoying a Japanese property for the sake of its own metrics. I don’t necessarily want to have my dialogue match what’s “normal” for my region, otherwise I’d just purchase a game that was made in the west.
Japanese storytelling (and any other culture for that matter) is unique. Why change it? In Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, there are some questionable translation choices that I just can’t jive with (eg: majority of Cait Sith’s catlike banter and the casts reaction to it is glossed over.)
Not to mention people thinking the original story is “problematic” and needs to be “fixed.” If you don’t like a cultures games, don’t play them pretty simple.
I’m still gonna play Unicorn Overlord but I’m not happy with these inaccuracies.
The article’s right about the conversation turning needlessly toxic. There’s people out there that are fanatics about accuracy for no good reason, even cases where I’ve seen a “TRASH localizer!” video that convinced me the localization was good in that it avoided repeat words, when they were attempting to state the opposite.
These people seriously need to either learn Japanese to play the game how they prefer, or just be silent and stop harassing game devs.
Hot take: I’m playing unicorn overlord and started it after I read this article a couple days ago. It’s honestly not that bad.
The story itself feels a little shallow, being about 10 hours in. Aside from a certain character being “abducted”, I really haven’t perceived any risk so far. It seems like every decision I make is a no-brainer with consequences only appearing if I make the obtusely obvious wrong decision.
Story and writing wise, it isn’t really the shining example of jrpgs to begin with, so the localisation just seems like a footnote so far.
The gameplay loop is pretty satisfying though, which is why I’m still in it. I’m ready for the writing to mature into a darker game and hoping that this first “chapter” is just a light beginning. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t happen.
To be honest, if I were going to be offended at anything in this game, it’d be the jiggly boobs on half the girl units for no reason and the overtly sexual way that the witch class character just… Stands there swinging her hips? But I’m not one to even care that much about eye candy. But it’d make a better complaint to me than overly-shakepearean localisation.
Night Dive should've been given some of these old Lucas Arts SW games. These were my childhood, and I've watched as Aspyr has been assigned game after game of my childhood to be released on modern platforms, and time and time again they either don't give enough of a shit to do anything more than get them running (sometimes barely that, Republic Commando runs worse on a switch than an original Xbox), or they're not given the proper time or financial budget to pull it off.
From what I read on Steam: Three servers, 64 players max each. Embarrassingly miniscule for one of the best selling, best received Star Wars games of its time, if not of all time. You’d expect more than 192 people would buy your game on launch, especially something this big.
Dude, imagine you buy a brand new car for a 5 person family and then as you arrive to drive it off the lot you find out its only got the two front seats… Launches like this are completely unacceptable.
…but not before launch? The game launched and they weren’t there? So they released a game and there were only three servers available? Hours later they added a bunch of servers? AFTER LAUNCH? Is there another way I can phrase this so you realise how stupid it is that you’re defending it?
Game has online problems for the first few hours after launch. This has never happened before in the history of video games. 🙄
Wasn’t Helldivers 2 almost impossible to play for the first month? Yet there wasn’t much anger about that. This has a problem for a few hours and it’s the worst thing that has ever happened. 😂
I recall there being plenty of talk about Helldivers servers. About a month’s worth. Meanwhile I haven’t seen a single person say this is the worst thing that’s ever happened or that it’s never happened before with other games, just that releasing a multiplayer game and only having three servers available is absurd. That and the apparently poor port at least on Switch detailed in another comment.
Believe it or not, shit happening before doesn’t change anything. Shit’s still shit. And we all already know the only actual obstacle to ensuring a smooth multiplayer launch (assuming a competently made game, of course) is paying for enough servers to handle the initial surge. They just prefer not to spend that money and present a poor experience to customers who buy the game at launch instead, because fuck them right.
I don’t own the game. It’s not a problem for me at all. It’s a principle, and a reflection of a publisher’s greed and disrespect towards its customers.
Do you know that people bought the game, downloaded it, installed it, sat to play it, and couldn’t because the publisher didn’t want to pay for the required servers for their most loyal customers to do so?
Sure, it’s good that there are servers now, but that’s the minimum I expect and I expect them there at launch. You know, so people who have paid money to play their game actually can. Far be it for me to think an online multiplayer game should have servers to play online multiplayer in when it’s available to buy.
Believe it or not it’s possible to gather information about things without directly experiencing it and I tend to do this with new games. I also already have the originals on steam.
Yes and it’s a multiplayer classic that they couldn’t play multiplayer in. It doesn’t ruin the game, it didn’t destroy the experience permanently, it’s not the end of the world, but it’s shit and only happened because of the publisher’s greed. No clue why you feel the need to defend it really.
[Edit] I also haven’t said a single word that even implies I’m an expert on it. I mentioned bugginess that I said I saw in a comment and talked about servers being unavailable. What level of star wars battlefront expert do you think I need to be to discuss specific star wars battlefront things like…bugs and servers?
But all people have said is that it’s buggy on switch (with screenshot proof) and that there weren’t enough servers for hours after launch. Is it you that’s overblowing it?
Not *A * multiplayer game. A multiplayer STAR WARS game. And not just any multiplayer Star Wars game - no, the single best received Star Wars game of its kind in the last two decades, coupled with its prequel… And they estimated around 200 people to play it at launch.
For those wondering if this is under exaggerated, it’s not. Now my experience is on the Switch.
This issues I saw in my time before I got refunded was as follow. Texture Flickering and Shadow Flickering (hard to see as a screen shot so this is the worse I saw)
Well I’m glad you laying it out for us, I’ve got a better idea what I’m dealing with. And it really does miff me on how unnecessarily wasteful the game is with storage
Ditto, I sadly didn’t go online so no comment there. Well I mean I tried once and I couldn’t connect so I just jumped into instant action. But yeah the storage requirements are a bit unrealistic on Switch. I don’t think you can even play it on OG switch without a Micro SD Card.
But you’re actually probably at least partly right. I’m sure they’ve done at least some upscaling and stored at a higher res which may actually take up more space.
The controls are “fine” for the most part. If you were on an Xbox controller it would work. Space Battles in Battlefront II are an improvement, but the same treatment was never made to Battlefront 1. If I had to complain about anything, it’s that the auto aim needs to be more sensitive and when you blast an enemy it auto locks on them like the console games. Mouse and keyboard this would be annoying but on controller it’s necessary.
Looking at the 34GB install, I’m guessing it’s some kind of massive emulation layer; it’s scary to say but I feel like we’ve just run out of game developers that can genuinely code against the machine itself to optimize install size and performance.
When you look back on the meager specs of old consoles and what they got running there, it now feels more and more impressive.
Sear the name Aspyr into your mind, and look out for them when they redo old star wars games like this. An underwhelming experience is what I've come to expect from their attempts at Jedi Outcast/Academy and Republic Commando on Switch.
The best you can expect from them is bare minimum passably running games, sort of the antithesis to Night Dive
Sear the name Embracer into your mind. This is what’s going to happen with any studio owned by them. This is what ruthlessly taking a blowtorch to all of your studios headcounts gets you.
Generally speaking, game devs never like putting out a bad product. It’s a creative industry, and one that people go into because they love games (otherwise they’d be working in fintech where the pay is much better). I guarantee it was Embracer who made the call to launch this product in its current broken state, and probably also Embracer who put so little money aside for server infrastructure.
Weren’t there a bunch of mods for the original releases that upgraded textures, added maps and factions and all that? Why would anyone buy these rereleases instead?
Another game launch, another broken game. How hard is it to just release a game that works? This is a port as well - pretty much their entire job with this was fixing issues and optimisation
I want to blame the company but from their point of view this business model works so I understand why it keeps happening.
Steam refunds are great for situations like these but I doubt the average casual knows how easy it is. The other platforms are much stricter on refunds.
There’s also the culture shift of gamers defending broken releases with “at least they fixed it!” Or “they released a roadmap for future fixes” that encourages early releases.
Harder than delivering shit and cashing in just as much. The grab&run simply is more profitable than actually putting in the work - especially since there seem to be no palpable negative consequences.
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